"Intel Corporation announced an important advance in the quest to use light beams to replace the use of electrons to carry data in and around computers. The company has developed a research prototype representing the world's first silicon-based optical data connection with integrated lasers. The link can move data over longer distances and many times faster than today's copper technology; up to 50 gigabits of data per second. This is the equivalent of an entire HD movie being transmitted each second."

I'm not impressed. Cisco had OC-768c/STM-256c (that's 40 Gbps to non-networking geeks)introduced and already installed back in 2007. (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlife/2007-07-19-swedi...) This was published just before intel announced their 40Gbps stuff. Not only that but dense wave division multiplexing has been around for 10GBps for even longer than that and you could multiplex up to 32 channels of 10Gbps into one fiber pair. That's 320Gbps people. The only thing new here is that it's being done all on one chip with integrated lasers and multiplexing at 12.5 Gbps per channel. The video on that site also implies that other modules could be linked with the first.Sounds like more multiplexing to me. Like I said.... Not impressed.

The only thing new here is that it's being done all on one chip with integrated lasers and multiplexing at 12.5 Gbps per channel.

That's a huge difference. It's a completely different application with very different requirements (most importantly power consumption and very short range).

As far as networking goes, people are now trying to use 100Gb/s long haul connections and probably even faster links at shorter distances. But these solutions (because of optics and power dissipation) are not suitable for integration on a single chip.

OTOH, Intel's chip has to compete with traditional wire-line transmission, which can now achieve similar performance (10Gb/s is standard, ~30Gb/s is in development) and don't require special process and package solutions. Electrical solutions typically are limited to a several tens of IO channels per chip (require several "pads" per channel for building a transmission line) and this (plus larger range) is where optical solution could potentially have an advantage.

Exactly. Integrating optical data transfer on a chip + using the wavelength multiplexing capabilities = making much, much faster buses. And opening the way for all-optical data processing in the future, which means little to no heat generation (which in turn means no more stupid fans. And cubic or spherical chip design instead of those boring plastic pancakes if you want it to be so), extreme parallelism, no more costly energy conversions in optical data transmission...

Integrating 50 GBps optical transmission on a chip is very exciting It's knowingly possible to make long-distance transfers at much faster speed, but it's the "integrated" word that matters here